My information, besides personal contacts with Young and possibly Cohen at a major CPUSA legal front conference (I also sat in a room with Bill Kunstler, Dennis Cunningham, Anne and Carl Braden, Richard (Dick) Criley, Harvey O’Connor, etc, all but Cunningham and Kunstler being sworn oath id. members of the CPUSA).
See the 1965 Chicago hearings for Cohen’s second id as a Party member. Quentin Young showed up in the HCUA hearings on the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention, among other citations. Criley has been identified in many hearings since literally the 1950’s, if not earlier.
Rose self-identified as a “leftist” going back as far as the 1948 Wallace for President campaign and I think he said that he was involved in the CPUSA political front, the American Labor Party.
Harold Washington is an interesting person. I do not know if he was a CPUSA member or not. I’m leaning against it but he was constantly referred to in the leftist media (Daily World, Guardian, Militant, etc). as a “leftist”, not a Social or Christian Democrat, “progressive” wasn’t in use back them except in Party writings.
However, he accepted Party people help in his political career, esp. David Simon Canter who was exposed as a Soviet asset as early as 1957 in congressional hearings.
Never said that Ayers had a direct CPUSA connection. More likely a Cuban connection through either going to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigades (a CPUSA aided, if not created Castro support operation) or with people who had gone (Kathy Boudin) and his wife Bernadine Dohrn. The passenger manifests for the first 5 VN trips to Cuba from about 1969-71 are found in the Congressional Record and the House Internal Security Committee report on the VB, published in 1972 in their “Theory and Practice of Communism” series of hearings.
Dohrn: p. 7824: Bernadine Rae Dohrn, on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list, and Julie Nichamin, leader of the Weatherman faction, SDS, were also founders of the Venceremos Brigade after they traveled to Cuba. A letter by Nichamin was seized from Dohrn’s apartment which laid out SDS ties to Jesus Jimenez Escobar, “a secretary to the Castro mission to the UN”. He was later expelled for subversive activities.
I saw Ayers at least once, July 1969, at the New Mobe founding conference where he, Dohrn and a whole conga-line of SDS pyschopaths and bombers announced that they would perform violence at the Oct./Nov. 1969 anti-Vietnam demonstrations in DC and San Francisco despite what the Communists (CPUSA/SWP) wanted in terms of how the protests were to be handled.
I may also have seen him in DC at the Mark Rudd talk at American Un. in 1969, along with Kathy Wilkerson and Jack Davis (SDS) regional leaders - DC).
I’d love to know how you meet the people you named and your knowledge of their ideological affiliations. Just a straight telling of your story sounds very interesting to this old street-pounding journalist.
Oh, I was once a member of SDS, for about one meeting before we realized that the college chapter we were members of were either batcrap crazy or cowards (the crazy ones got their asses kicked at American Un. but Davis and another Jack helped take over Georgetown Un and GWU because of spineless administrators and do-nothing fraternities.
At least at AU the fraternities threw SDS out of the president’s office. Don’t recall whether they bothered to open the windows and doors before they cleaned house. Not important. It was the thought that counted.
The biggest mystery to me is how Canter received a law license? Who approved him at the Character & Fitness Committee based upon his Communist background?